Christmas is over. Normally this means the end of an intense time full of homemade cookies, presents, family meals and visits, ugly window decorations, and horrible music in the supermarket. This time this also means that I survived the christmas+crowdfunding chocolate production madness!1

New production beyond the christmas+crowdfunding madness… and no more hand-dipping (YES YES YES!).

Two weeks full of rush, chaos, excitement have passed since the start of the KÄNDI crowdfunding campaign. Now things look good: Today the campaign reached 90% of our first goal! And the recipes for our first three candy bars are nearly ready to go.

After more than six weeks my first post for this year! What a burden…
Feels like I am far too late for a classical ‘what comes 2015?’ post. Well, who cares.

I am in busy times right now and don’t find any time to spend on blogging. Much worse, I don’t find time to experiment in my kitchen. By now I should maybe rather speak of my kitchen lab because that’s what it became over the last 2 years. Speaking of which: I did spend a lot of time in my kitchen lab in December so that I could distribute many candy bars and caramels to friends and family.

Candy bar prototypes I made shortly before Christmas. Organic, plant-based, dark caramel with peanuts in dark chocolate. With and without fleur de sel on top. It feels great to do ‘experiments’ where the results are perfectly edible.

Feels like I am soooo slow when it comes to blogging. No way that I can keep up with my fast growing (imaginary) list of things I wanted to write about. Thus: random picking!
I still haven’t finished my list of Amsterdam chocolate places, so let me introduce another one that was missing: chocolatier Van Soest!

When I started blogging about Amsterdam’s chocolate world I really had in mind to cover it as completely as possible. Somehow I never finished the list I initially had in mind. Time to catch up I guess.
One place I haven’t mentioned so far in more detail is ‘ArtiChoc‘ located south of Vondelpark in one of the traditionally richer areas of Amsterdam.

Bonbon selection at ‘Arti Choc’, an Amsterdam chocolatier south of Vondelpark.

Finally I created one single page to give a brief overview of the Amsterdam chocolate scene. Not without some super-objective quantification of course. After all, I’m still a scientist… but have a look yourself.

Amsterdam chocolatiers have finally been quantified according to internationally accepted sweet matter units.

When I started writing about chocolate places in Amsterdam I already had my two favorite spots. Until now, two things kept me from featuring them in full detail. I didn’t want to start with the greatest Amsterdam highlights. And I wanted to make sure that I spend enough time with all the other places Amsterdam has to offer (some of which I also liked a lot!). Still there’s always personal favorites. And if it comes to pralines/bonbons/chocolates1, my favorite is: Metropolitan.

I often like English as a language, but here I hate it. Why is “chocolates” both used for the bonbon (Dutch) / Praline (German) / praline belge (French) and the plural of chocolate bars? Too confusing for me. [↩]

When entering this place it’s hard to focus on chocolates, bonbons, candy only, because there is this huge amount of glamorous cakes and tarts in all colors and sizes. But even if you do focus on the chocolates only, it’s clearly worth a visit.